The starting planting date for fall spinach finally arrived this week, closing the circle of planting dates for this year's garden since it is the first crop to be planted in the spring and the last for the fall. There will be about another month of planting for cold hardy crops like the spinach, mustard, and turnips, but most of the other crops cannot be planted now and expect them to mature, I may slip in one more planting of Swiss chard, but the fall frost dates are closing upon us rapidly. Next year's vegetable garden will start with the first sowing of cabbage seedlings close to Christmas.

The warning signs have been there for several weeks. The bright early dawns of summer have slipped back into the shadows of lengthening nights. The weather is somewhat cooler, no longer thwarting the tomatoes in their efforts to set fruit. They're loaded with green tomatoes and setting more. A few ripen occasionally from a sparse summer set of fruit.

The tomato feasts have had sweet ripe peppers added to the salad bowls. The plants are still rather small, but they are managing to ripen nice plump peppers. I've picked several orange peppers and several red peppers, and a blocky purple pepper is rapidly losing the traces of green still striping its skin.

I had more lettuce and turnip greens planted early in the week, and several rows of spinach seeds went in today. The broccoli and cabbage seedlings are doing well, some attacked by cabbage worms but I'm watering them with a Dipel solution to check the attack. If I have the room, I might plant a few more cabbage seeds to pull as seedlings for greens, a tasty addition to the table when they are cooked like collards. It would be too late to start more cabbages or broccoli from seed and have enough time before hard frost for them to grow heads.

The fledglings have grown into independent birds, mixing with their parents still hunting for food where they can find it. The squirrels are still raising litters, though. Mischief spotted a mother squirrel carrying a baby in her mouth as she scrambled up a tree. I could see him mentally estimating whether he could catch them as she lunged up the trunk, but he had just been fed and was not particularly interested in hunting at the moment.

He is still assisting me with my knitting, inspecting the new piece in progress for its suitability for a cat bed. Both cats are still enjoying the new star quilt on my bed, squabbling for sole ownership at times, but Rascal is too big to lie on most knitted projects until they are almost big enough to fit me. That's when he occasionally joins in the attack.

I've got the patchwork jacket's sleeves knitted and ready to sew in place. I have the buttons for the front ribbing in place and partly sewn on. This project is slowly but surely reaching completion. I've got a country rose sweater started so I can switch back and forth between the two according to my mood. Sometimes I feel like humoring the cat with a project that he can sleep on while I work on another part of it, sometimes I run him off so I can turn the rows as I finish each one.

I also have that flannel cat block quilt waiting to be finished. I came up with an idea for sashing that should be interesting but still fairly easy. I had some flower and leaf appliques in mind for it using my favorite quilting templates, and lo and behold, on my favorite quilting site the host had posted an article for a similar applique. I take that as an encouraging coincidence.

With the gardening slackening off and another box of children's sweaters recently sent, I want to spend more time on fall projects for myself. I need to get some more clothes sewn up and sweaters knitted. I embarrassed myself this morning by grabbing a shirt with paint blotches to wear to a doctor's appointment, not realizing it until I got there because I have a second shirt just like it except that it doesn't have paint blotches. I�ve got so many old shirts moved into the gardening clothing section of my closet that the "nice" clothes are being squeezed into one overlapping sliver on the clothes rod. I'm in severe fabric.com withdrawal, and they're having another great sale on all sorts of fabric and a yarn closeout.